Cornish Cross - From Start to Finish

[Music] [Music] [Music] okay they're already busy little things running back and forth and this is how we like to keep them like to keep them moving and it's going to be warm enough that they'll be able to get outside fast and we like to get hours outside on grass by three weeks if not sooner it seems like if you wait longer than that they just don't really get what it's like to be outside running around and we like ours to run around so we'll keep them in a big pen keep them moving around and i think you'll see that cornish cross do not have to be those lazy layabout messy chickens if you raise them differently they have grown a lot i can tell just since they came last wednesday so not even a week old and they're already getting big they're both they're doing great we haven't lost one of them they're really super healthy chicks i'm really pleased with them so far and the way they're set up is they have one water and then these little feed troughs down the side and they've really started to take off on how much they're eating the last couple days too which tends to happen the meat chicks are going to be two weeks old tomorrow and i'm now starting to force the issue on them coming outside they're not real happy about it but this is how we get them moving so i pretty much in the morning today just forced them all out of their pen outside and i'll need to get a fence up for them but i'm out here right now watching them the temperature is in the 70s so it's pretty warm and it's been in the 80s the last couple days so i haven't even had heat on them and they seem to be just fine that doesn't mean you never need to you you don't ever need heat on them at this age but it's just been extremely warm here and that's about what they would be at anyways is around 80 85 this time so they're doing just fine feathering in i throw a lot of scratch out for them some cracked corn to kind of get them motivated to get out and usually once they find the grass and they can have fun and peck around in the dirt they don't have any problems they enjoy coming outside so that's what i'm trying to expose them to right now at two weeks old is that outside is actually fun because if they don't learn that they won't they won't go out on their own but you have to make sure they're safe because they're definitely hawk bait they're all kinds of bait right now so you want to make sure they're definitely protected and safe but getting meat chickens out as early as you can there do you see he's got something getting them out as early as you can might just be a cobweb getting them out as early as you can is the success to getting them outside and running at this age they put themselves in it dark they come right on in on their own so we don't have to mess with that we expanded their indoor pen to be just about as big as it could be maybe there's an extra foot we could expand it but this is still working really well with them they still have room especially since they're outside most of the time as far as the bedding at this point we are changing it about once a week and it's using i don't know it's using about one big um bale of budding which we're still using probably less or the same not more than we would if we had done deep litter bedding and i think it keeps it a lot nicer in here as far as their feed goes you can see their troughs and at this point we fill those chops in the morning and they eat and then we fill them again in the late afternoon and once it's gone it's gone so they aren't eating a ton they're not sitting and eating food all day long but they're just growing really well at this point since we're one week out i'm gonna start mixing corn in with their feed and by the end of this week they'll be on about almost 50 50. that's kind of how i finish them you can you know you can research that and do what you like but i like to finish them that way that lower protein is going to also slow their growth a little bit so that they don't get completely ginormous the meat chickens are six weeks old now and they love being outside in the mornings and the evenings not so much during the hot sun and you can see that they have gotten huge haven't they at six weeks old and these are from mount healthy and we've not lost one still we still have all 31 that we started with these have been phenomenal they've done really well and to be this big at six weeks is really great too because they haven't been eating a ton you know i feed them fill their feeders in the morning and then i feed them in the evening in their troughs so i feel they've grown really really well and been very healthy these are all pullets in case i haven't told you that before i just ordered them that way for something different this year and they've been very calm and peaceful not the skirmishes we have sometimes we just weighed them tonight weighed two of them and one of them was like five pounds something and another was 6.2 pounds so we want them to be a little on the bigger side so we have set butcher day for one week on next saturday tomorrow these chickens will be seven weeks old from the day that they ship from the hatchery and tomorrow is also processing day for them and we still have all 31 birds and i'll tell you they have grown well they have been peaceful and calm no problems from these guys whatsoever and they came from mount healthy hatchery again so we'll probably use them in the future since we'll be back to buying meat birds it has been hot the last couple days i mean yesterday was like 92 and it was so so miserably humid and even then they've done well we didn't lose any so i'll show you what we do with them in hot weather you know they have access to the outside of course but we also run a fan on them to make sure that they have some airflow and if we were going to keep them past tomorrow it's because it's going to continue to be this hot i would get another fan on here or fan out here on them also but out of all 31 birds we have that one right there who has a little bit of trouble getting around she can still get around enough to get to food and water but she she's not real steady on her feet so that's the only leg problem we have which people always talk about their legs going out from under them and honestly that doesn't even happen to us every single batch this one has been a little weak all the way through really not enough to hamper getting around and getting to food and water and see getting over to getting that breeze there's a breeze there but that's not been a problem for us they are now on about 50 um 18 poultry pellet and cracked corn here i'm starting over the weekend i did that these last few days i like to do that to finish them i don't know if that does anything or not but is what i do and they still come out um and spend most of their day most of their morning and evening i should say outside they don't like it in the you know hot sun it gets hot here in the midday they'll go back inside but but they enjoy outside they're not as free rangy as some of the chickens that we've had but that's okay too they still get out and get around there's their little dust bathing spot very good looking chickens and tomorrow tomorrow is processing day time to put them in the freezer today these guys are seven weeks old right on the nose they shipped out on a wednesday and today is a wednesday so seven weeks old and they look beautiful we would have let them go until this weekend but it is going to be in the 90s and super humid so they're ready to go meat chickens when they get this big are kind of a precarious situation because at this size they don't handle the heat well so this is our setup we're not going to show you how to butcher there's a lot of those videos out there but what we do we've done a lot of these meat birds so we kind of have a setup and we use the cones and our goal is a very quick humane death they've had a great life and then one bad day here is what we what we strive for and then the turkey fryer is our scalder and that works pretty well steve puts a little bit of soap in there and then we have a plucker this was our great find on face or on craigslist the first time we did chicken so this works really well and then inside the garage we have a bucket where after steve plucks them they go in this bucket until i am ready for them and this is my table over here with some you know soapy water to keep things clean and i have ice salt water to put the gizzards and hearts any of that that i'm gonna keep this will probably upset some people but we don't use a lot of that and don't keep a lot of it if i don't have somebody that wants it right away and then these are our chill buckets which will have ice water in them and that's where they're going to stay until i'm ready to take them inside and finish just the final prep of taking off any pin feathers on anything else cleaning them up getting them in a bag and from that point we will chill the birds some in the refrigerator the rest in ice coolers for at least 24 hours maybe a day and a half until they're pretty pliable you'll be able to tell for a resting period and then we shrink wrap them and freeze them and cut up the pieces that we want or however we want to do it one note these guys have not had food since yesterday afternoon it looks like they're still searching trying to find some but hopefully you know before you're ready to process your birds you want to make sure that they have not been eating it just makes it much much easier and we also keep them inside today because they'll go outside and fill up on grass if they can so we keep coming over and taking birds out to go process and in the meantime these guys are just chilling out in here enjoying their life and that is very important to us that this be done humanely so there's no stress we used to take them somewhere and that was so stressful on them and me trying to haul them and get them there this way is just kind of peaceful up to the end and we really appreciate that okay we're gonna weigh a couple of the meat chickens so here is here's one this is one of the bigger meat chickens that we had so that was just over six pounds and that's what that one actually looks like so a really nice size chicken and here is another one see that was about six pounds too they were pretty much uniformly right around you know five to six pounds so now it's time to process the meat chickens and get them into the freezer so i usually cut up around like eight maybe eight or nine maybe ten i'm not sure what i did and get them into pieces so i separate them out into thighs and a couple bags of wings and then chicken breast and then some tenders that i cut up and i use the backs and the necks and whatever else is left that i don't use in bags that i will use for broth later and then we also shrink wrap the rest of them these are just in regular ziplocks but we'll shrink wrap them but i wanted to show you how pretty they look so with this we did 31 chickens and we will give a few away but i would say overall we'll have about probably 20 to 22 going in the freezer and that is the chicken that we're gonna use this next year so there's a look at what's already in pieces and the rest is just going to be shrink wrapped ready to go in the freezer and now we're back to just a normal backyard [Music] it was seven weeks of kind of gross and disgusting in the backyard but that's it you'll never know what happened in a few weeks once all those feathers blow away you

Channel: Chicken Hues

Views: 15,587

Rating: 4.8907852 out of 5

Keywords: raising meat birds, raising meat chickens, raising broilers, raising roasters, raising cornish cross, raising meat chicks, processing meat birds, processing cornish cross, processing broilers, Homesteady, Justin Rhodes, brooding meat birds, brooding cornish cross, feeding meat birds, feeding meat chickens, feeding cornish cross, pastured meat chickens, free range meat chickens

Id: DcRCc9IrYEs

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020